Mayor Eric Garcetti’s new government-performance website could give Los Angeles residents a lot of vital information about the city and whether its leaders are making life better here. Or, the database could raise as many questions as it answers.

Will the site include statistics that make City Hall look bad? (Garcetti says yes, it will be honest.) Will it answer the questions Angelenos are really asking? Will it present statistics in complete, cogent ways?

And, as long as the site is giving us statistics by which to assess the work of city employees, will it have statistics to assess the work of the city employees compiling those statistics? Who’s judging the judges? This could get complicated.

To make the new mayor’s metrics initiative a success, it seems clear that other city officials and the public must take part in shaping it.

When Garcetti unveiled the website, www.lamayor.org/performance, on his 100th day in office last week, he emphasized that it is a work in progress. The web pages covering some city departments say “under construction,” including most pertaining to city finances.

Modeled on other cities’ data sites, such as Baltimore’s CitiStat, and the Los Angeles Police Department’s Compstat crime-data analysis, this is promising in several ways. It is part of a welcome push by the 42-year-old Garcetti to modernize city bureaucracy. It underscores Garcetti’s stated focus on improving the city’s delivery of basic services — public safety, street upkeep, utilities and the like. It could give government employees the sort of incentive that many in private business have, namely measurable standards. It makes tangible (as tangible as a website can be) Garcetti’s commitment to government transparency.

But putting data online for the public to see doesn’t advance the cause of open government unless an administration is also responsive to public and press inquiries about unanticipated questions. Skepticism about a website like Garcetti’s is warranted: For truth-seekers, the only thing as worrisome as a government that hides information is one that’s a little too eager to supply it.

The website is, at least for now, long on elementary numbers and short on analytics. Look up data on potholes, that most basic of L.A. problems, and a bar chart shows the number of “Annual Small Asphalt Repairs” rose in the past two years from 297,561 to 301,653 to 354,125. What it doesn’t say is how many needed repairs aren’t getting done. Fire department response times? They’re listed, but with nothing to indicate if the numbers are good or bad, going up or down. Such lack of context is typical in the website’s beta version.

Ideally, as more and more cities set up public databases, they would be reasonably standardized to help residents judge their government’s performance against others’. L.A.’s database should display goals against which voters can judge city officials’ success or failure. Residents should have the opportunity to suggest criteria for assessing City Hall’s performance and to request different data; some interactivity would be nice.

This should be a two-way street. Instead of accepting the Garcetti administration’s version of what Angelenos should know, they should be telling the city what they need to know.